As winter creeps upon the city
I feel my circulation slow
while staring at hand-held lovers
wishing for someone to show
me how to feel anything for anyone,
when I’ve lost all feeling in my own
hands. How am I supposed to love
at all if I can’t even shake the cold
nostalgia of you? Naively, I yawn
you off as I do sleep and wait up,
anticipating you like death.
To wake alone is all I want
but instead I wake without you

Language is an insatiable demandfor light which begets the immeasurable depths of darkness.

There is a luminous light bulbthat floats above my head,not inside it. There is no lightof mind, and language is no light source: words fail to befluorescent.

The mind is a sunless place. History is from there, calls it home.History is just words. It is no wonder why it only always tells of our darkest hours:

There is a war inside my head.As I fight for the words, I find themvying with the sun to illuminate this world. My words want nothingof the day other than to bethe very light defining it.But words are just shadows.No light touches them.

(No light touches me.)

And I cannot be—I cannot bethe sun, or even a ray of sunlightno, I must mean. Language makes memean.

and to mean is to declare war on words, with words; is to fight passionately on the front line; is to confront death and live in spite of it, in spite of a deep dark desire for it. But we aren’t supposed to speakof such things. So we dream them.

Oh, this tragedy
called my tongue—how it is only
valued for what it learns,
for it’s skilled labor of language:

What good is a sense of taste
if I lack the means to describe it?
What is thirst other than the word itself?
A tongue without language merely
swallows
swallows
swallows.
A tongue lacking language is not.

I don’t know what I want (simply because I can’t articulate the real), and yet it doesn’t matter how eloquently I attempt to articulate it: I will never just be [in the real], thus/because I mean in a world of language. It’s a paradox that instigates relentless desire. However, when we struggle to fit our desires into language, what does this mean? What if we simply cannot put our desires into words? Is this bad? So long as our desires antagonize reality-as-we-know-it, why would we even strive to put them (our desires) into words and bring them to mean in a world of language that facilitates and reinforces a reality we aim to dismantle? Can the end of capitalism—for example—ever occur if our language proliferates its symptoms?

If desire desires to end itself, then the desire for rupture is the death drive put into action: it is the overwhelming desire for something else—something unknown. It is the desire for (the impossibility of) something real. I don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it—I don’t know what I mean, but I know I’m going to die someday. Is this irrational and contradicting? Yes! Words are absurd, and language is an amusing system of impossibilities.

I desire rupture in reality—be it the riot, the orgasm, or the shot that gets me drunk—I desire disruption in/of language, the kind we aren’t rushing to bring into meaning. In these ruptures, one falls into the here and now, even if for a few seconds—we feel timeless; nothing else matters, and we don’t care to make sense of it. Language isn’t real and neither am I, and what feels real to me is everything I can’t put into words. I have a love/hate relationship with language, yet it is feeling so ambivalent that keeps me passionately desiring what I can’t put into words and bring to mean. Language makes me feel infantile.

these days, I conflate
nausea and nostalgia
they start and end
the same, after all,
and out of all things
I find it convenient,
as most things aren’t
so blatantly misleading
as those hunger pangs,
their respective forms
of abjection, of loss,
and emptiness that keep
me too reluctant to even
entertain the thought,
to even eat—

nauseous, nostalgic
and not sure which one
I was first;

they keep me too reliant
on an 80-proof vertigo
to prepare me for drift offs
worth their jet lags as I spend
the morning after at the kitchen
sink chugging water as if I’ll get
my money back

it is as if
the act of living and the act of dying are the only
verbs we’ll ever do–and in doing so we will
never know if we are alive and slowly dying,
or if we are living to eventually die, or if there
is even a difference or a point in asking because
to live and to die are intransitive–actions lacking
object: performed alienations. Empty fucking
signifiers. I will live and then I will die–writing
of this dispossession; knowing my words will
never make an open door out of death.

And in every word I speak, in every second I sustain steady eye contact with you, there is some part of me, some fiber of my being that I over-compensate in attempt to make up for all the voids in my chest, all the interstices that formed in place of all the stolen parts of me. I am so unbearably vulnerableand it’s people like you that partake in my hollowing out, a caving in of the self,
towards a praxis of breaking down [again].
This is the shutting down of my damned
desires and rise of a terrible estrangement.

They keep saying that nonprofit art muralsand more surveillance cameras on the walls of buildings will help the streets struggle less

will make the buildings look less empty as if all Atlanta really needs is a facelift,that if Atlanta would just pave and paint and build over all the poverty, the struggle, then the disenfranchised will be thankful and a hundred plus years of hate will no longer haunt here

as if the side effect of Art is amnesia;we’ll forget our own struggle, becauseour neighborhood has some new paint on a wall where our graffiti once wasand everything looks nice now, so nicethat we wantto fuckit up.